Parents Learning English

I’m including below a very nice column by Joanne Jacobs of the San Jose Mercury News, praising the successful English tutoring program established by Prop. 227. This is Jacobs’s second column on the clear success of Prop. 227, and is especially noteworthy since she had actually opposed the initiative at the time of the vote, although with very mixed feelings.

During the 1998 campaign, almost all of California’s newspapers and columnists had urged the defeat of Prop. 227. In the two years since then, dozens of news stories have appeared on the results of the initiative, virtually all of the very favorable, many of them glowingly, even embarrassingly so. Yet with the sole exception of the remarkably honorable Ms. Jacobs, I am not aware of a single one of these newspapers or columnists who has admitted the initiative’s success.

Editors and journalists regularly criticize politicians for seeking to hide their mistakes in silence. Perhaps they should occasionally look in the mirror.